Bexar Home Values Rise, Bucking National Trend

posted by Jim Forsyth, photo credit Shutterstock Images
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3 years ago

The old joke is that real estate is all about location, location, and location, and it turns out that in this decade, San Antonio is the right location to own a home.

1200 WOAI news reports that San Antonio home values jumped $6,000 since the Great Recession began in 2009.

"It's one of only three of the fifty largest counties in the country to experience a significant housing value gain," said Ellen Baker Wilson, a statistician with the U.S. Bureau of the Census, which released the report.

In fact, the Census Bureau says home values have fallen in 39 of the fifty biggest metro areas in the country, with California, and Florida, which experienced overheated housing prices during the housing boom of the last decade, experiencing the largest declines.

Four of the ten metro areas where median home values actually increased were in Texas.

"Because we say many many declines, and Bexar County is one of the few increases," she said.

Nationwide, home prices peaked in the spring of 2007 and bottomed out in early 2011, Housing nationwide began a sustained recovery at the start of 2012.

The Census Bureau says one of the reasons for the boom in housing prices locally is that metro San Antonio's home prices are among the lowest in the country, with the median price of a home in the county at about $123,000.

Wilson says Bexar and Travis Counties say housing value increases, but those increases were not spread evenly across the state.

"Bexar had an increase of $6,000 while Dallas County decreased by $2600 and Harris County (Houston) decreased by $2700," she said.

The report also shows that Americans in their twenties are buying homes at the lowest rate since home ownership became a middle class activity in the 1950s. The report says young people today are overburdened by expensive student loans and toiling in low wage, part time jobs. Some have begun to refer to people in their twenties as 'Generation Wait.'